McDonald’s, the global leader in quick service restaurants, had goals to achieve greater efficiencies across technology + people management. We showed them ways to operationalize those goals through new technology capabilities.

McDonald’s is no stranger to operational excellence; the company prides itself on its mastery of just-in-time ordering, franchise management, and delivering customer happiness through feel-good moments. In their pursuit of greater efficiency across the board, my team and I helped build new experimental prototypes and conduct on-the-ground research to better understand the needs of both customers and crew.

Shaving off as little as 10 seconds at the Drive Thru can translate into millions in cost savings. When we conducted research on the crew’s impact on order fulfillment, we realized that implementing new customer-facing technologies like mobile and kiosk ordering were causing confusion. We worked closely with the internal innovation team to prototype crew support tools that were incredibly successful in helping staff sense incoming demand, allowing them to better serve customers by providing hot, fresh food the moment it was ordered.

As a designer on this team of 3, I facilitated research session with crew members, I ran leadership workshops to better define our value prop, and I concepted with our technology partners, Panasonic, to build out a real in-kitchen solution. McDonald’s continues to reshape the way they run operations through the introduction of savvy technology solutions to assist in decision-making.